When US soldiers based in Suffolk saw lights, triangular aircraft and 'non-humans' the MoD 'shut it down'. Now 45 years later they tell their story for first time - and astonishing truth about how clo

Daily Mail​

24-07-2025

Did aliens land outside an American airbase in Suffolk 45 years ago to probe its secret stash of nuclear warheads?
Or is the story a fisherman's tale that just gets bigger every time it is told?
Clearly something unusual happened in the early hours of Boxing Day morning in Rendlesham Forest, near the twin RAF bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge, that's still being talked about today.
Some claim the latter Nato base was visited by UFOs, leading to a 'meet and greet' with silver-suited aliens and American top military brass that was caught on film.
Others, as the Mail can exclusively reveal, are convinced the Christmas visitors were interested in a secret nuclear missile stockpile, stashed just a few miles from Ipswich, where the good people of Suffolk were obliviously sleeping off their Christmas indulgences.
What everyone agrees on, however, is that the full story has never been disclosed. Until now.
A new feature length documentary, eight years in the making, re-ignited the decades-old Rendlesham Forest UFO mystery when it premiered last week.
Called Capel Green, after a field situated between the RAF Woodbridge airfield and the medieval Butley Priory in Suffolk, where the story is set, it re-creates the action seen through the eyes of a US airman who claims he witnessed it.
As a keen UFOlogist who has closely followed the Rendlesham story for decades, I fear the truth won't be the Close Encounters tale everyone craves, but rather yet another example of the British and American governments using UFO conspiracy stories as a convenient cloak for their nefarious, top-secret activities at the height of the Cold War, as confirmed last month in a bombshell report published by The Wall Street Journal.
Yet, that will be cold comfort for those Suffolk residents, who, in 1980, had no idea how close they were sleeping to the weapons of Armageddon that Christmas night.
The Capel Green film includes interviews with US security police, some of whom have never spoken on camera before, plus a newly recruited US airman, Larry Warren, just 19 at the time, who claims he had a front-row seat to the whole happening.
Larry Warren claims he had a front-row seat to the whole happening at Rendlesham Forest when he was 19
The Capel Green film includes interviews with US security police, some of whom have never spoken on camera before
In the film, he describes how he was told to hand over his rifle and driven in a Jeep to a clearing in the forest that was covered in glowing mist.
It was then, he says, that he saw a 'basketball sized red light in the sky' followed by a 'blinding flash of light'.
It was then he saw a triangular-shaped 'machine, object or craft' on the ground and – most astonishingly of all – three 'non-human beings' emerging from it.
These beings, he said, were then greeted by a tall man he believed was the most senior officer at the Nato complex, US air force wing commander (later brigadier general) Gordon Williams.
According to Warren, footage of this incredible meeting was captured on film, the footage handed to the pilot of a F-15 jet and later flown to the US air force HQ in Germany, never to be seen again.
Which is all very intriguing – and understandably greeted with a huge amount of scepticism.
Wing commander Gordon Williams, it should be noted, has never publicly commented on Rendlesham, but in 2003 described Warren's claims as 'a flight of fancy'.
Whatever happened, the incident wasn't a one-off and UFOs were seen around the base for at least three nights.
On December 28, 1980, the deputy base commander, lieutenant colonel Charles Halt, led a team of airmen into the forest to investigate his colleague's strange report.
As Halt made a running commentary of events on his hand-held tape recorder, his men gasped as they spotted a pulsing red light that resembled a winking eye between the trees.
Later three star-like lights in the sky were seen low in the north and south, hovering until daybreak. Halt claims one of these projected a pencil-thin beam of light into the weapons storage area of nearby RAF Bentwaters 'like it was looking for something'.
In the film, US security policeman Sergeant Steve Longero, who was assigned to protect the nuclear warheads at the Suffolk base, also claims to have seen a beam of light scanning the whole of the weapons storage area.
Charles Halt's memo summarising the Rendlesham sightings was sent to the British Ministry of Defence in January 1981 and became one of the most famous documents in the history of UFOlogy when it was leaked to the media.
As a teenage UFO enthusiast, I clearly recall being gripped by the headline 'UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK: And that's OFFICIAL' that broke the Rendlesham Forest story in October 1983.
To many UFOlogists, the Rendlesham incident offered the exciting possibility of a 'British Roswell' right on our doorstep.
The News Of The World front page from 1983 reads: 'UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK: And that's OFFICIAL'
To many UFOlogists, the Rendlesham incident offered the exciting possibility of a 'British Roswell' right on our doorstep
Roswell, as every UFO buff knows, was a mysterious incident in Roswell, New Mexico that happened in 1947, when a downed balloon used to spy on Soviet atomic tests was spun into a story of a captured flying saucer.
For those who wanted to believe, Rendlesham appeared to have everything Roswell had: impressive military witnesses, official documentation and what appeared to be a determined government attempt at a cover-up.
As an investigative journalist seeking answers, I used the precursor to the UK's Freedom of Information Act to persuade the MoD to release their own 150-page file on the case in 2001.
Sadly, I found no smoking gun, although I did find a letter written by the then-defence minister, Michael Heseltine, shortly after the story broke, giving unequivocal assurance 'that there is not a grain of truth in the allegation that there has been a cover-up about alleged UFO sightings'.
But remember, this was the Eighties and the height of the Cold War, where 'truth' could be subjective. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan a year earlier and tensions were high in Eastern Europe.
Not so many miles away, at Greenham Common in Berkshire, the first tents were being pitched in a protest camp outside another American airbase, where cruise missiles were being stored.
The protest would go on for the next 19 years and draw worldwide media attention – something the US and UK governments were keen to avoid in Suffolk.
In 2002, I met with RAF squadron leader, Don Moreland, who was the British liaison officer for the two bases at the time. The question of nuclear weapons was dodged deftly.
'The MoD thing was, we don't confirm or deny it. I don't know whether there were nuclear weapons there, and I was the RAF commander,' he told me.
'I could probably guess that there might have been there but they wouldn't tell me.'
But last summer a US intelligence officer-turned UFO whistleblower, Luis Elizondo, claimed in his explosive book, Imminent, that the Rendlesham incident was indeed linked to the secret stockpile of nuclear weapons at nearby RAF Bentwaters – now a Cold War Museum.
He said the 'beam' described by multiple witnesses had 'hovered specifically over an underground bunker' where the stash was held. He said the visit triggered a 'flash override' that gave the US president, Jimmy Carter, direct control of the weapons in the event of a surprise attack.
Many theories have come and gone over the years, the earliest being put forward by astronomer Ian Ridpath who discovered the initial sighting coincided with a bright fireball meteor that appeared to fall into the forest in the early hours of Boxing Day.
Ridpath believes that once the airmen on the patrol became convinced a UFO had landed, they walked into the forest, where they saw the pulsing beam from the Orford Ness lighthouse, about six miles away on the Suffolk coast.
Professor David Clarke has spoken to several key men regarding the mysterious events that took place 45 years ago
Others have come forward to claim the sightings were caused by pranksters: in 2015 I received a letter from an anonymous source claiming to be a 'retired SAS trooper with inside knowledge of Rendlesham' who immediately got my attention.
He claimed the UFOs were created by pyrotechnics rigged up by Special Forces in the forest, in revenge for being caught and roughed up by US security forces during an exercise to test the base defences.
But, however exciting this theory might sound, the date stamp on the letter gave the game away: it was carefully timed to arrive on April 1.
Four decades have passed and the basic story has become ever more complicated and exaggerated, with numerous claims and counter-claims from both believers and sceptics.
Halt's straightforward, if bizarre, account of 'unexplained lights' seen in a forest at Christmas time has been transformed into a complex modern legend involving missing time, conspiracies and messages from time travellers.
Even the most dedicated supporters of the UFO story have struggled to reconcile the ever-changing accounts told by the principal witnesses.
Sergeant Jim Penniston's account of having approached the landed UFO in the forest on Boxing Day and made sketches of it was once regarded as good evidence. But his credibility crumbled when he announced, on the 30th anniversary, that he had received a 'download' of binary code when he touched the object that he wrote down in a notebook. He also claimed to have received a telepathic message from the craft's occupants who'd come from our future to gather genetic material. 'They are time travellers,' he said. 'They are us.'
Charles Halt went on, after retirement from the US air force, to write a book and has made frequent TV appearances. In 2010 he signed a statement that said he believed the UFOs were 'extraterrestrial in origin and that the security services of both the United States and UK have attempted – both then and now – to subvert the significance of what occurred in Rendlesham forest and RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation'.
But Halt's superior officer, Colonel Ted Conrad, responded with a scathing account of Halt's credibility when we met in 2016.
The Texan-born former top gun fighter pilot told me, in no uncertain terms: '[Halt] should be ashamed and embarrassed by his allegation that his country and England both conspired to deceive their citizens over this issue. He knows better.'
Colonel Conrad was base commander and said he carried out the only formal investigation of the UFO sightings on behalf of General Williams, his boss and, according to Larry Warren, the man who officially greeted the aliens that night.
But he failed to find any hard evidence and said the MoD decided to 'shut down' the whole incident.
Despite his scepticism, Conrad admitted that something unexplained really did happen that Christmas but claimed the whole saga has taken on a life of its own.
'I don't recognise the details anymore,' he told me. 'It resembles science fiction and I have a low opinion of those telling these stories.'
Then there is Larry Warren, the homesick teenage airman, whose story is the focus of the film Capel Green.
The film's director, Dion M Johnson ,describes him as 'the original military witness and whistleblower' who has 'fought for the truth to be revealed'.
But others have cast doubt upon his credibility, including Peter Robbins, with whom he co-authored a book about the incident, called Left At East Gate, in 1997.
He later publicly disowned Warren, saying 'my former author has taken me for the ride of my life'.
Former MoD UFO desk officer Nick Pope has gone further, describing Warren's story as 'largely fabricated' and 'part-stolen from other witnesses', such as Halt, that he believes are credible.
Astronomer Ian Ridpath says 'on the face of it the Rendlesham story sounds inexplicable, but when broken down into its individual elements it is possible to work out what actually happened.
'As with most UFO cases, it amounts to a series of misidentifications of natural and man-made objects, namely a fireball, the lighthouse and twinkling stars. However, the UFO believers have no interest in solutions.
'For them the case has become a modern myth, and films like Capel Green simply add to that mythology.'
Much like its American cousin Roswell, the Rendlesham story is likely to keep on growing as a snowball does rolling down a hillside, that keeps getting bigger and bigger with every re-telling.